It is often said that a person with manners never lets another person feel bad about themselves. Everyone deserves respect, yet some people are under the misconception that others deserve it more. The person who is sweeping up the street is a human being who deserves the same respect as the president of the United States, but he is not going to get it, despite the fact that both men, as they say, put their pants on in the same way. Both are mortal and neither can escape death. The impact that the president has on others is apparent. The impact the street sweeper has is not apparent, but is still there. Each person’s life has value and impacts other’s lives. Everyone deserves respect.

Often, when we have a conflict with another individual, we will be tempted to try to diminish their sense of self worth by showing them little or no respect. Do you think that this is a healthy way to resolve conflict?

One of the first things you want to do when you find yourself involved in a conflict with another individual is to acknowledge the fact that this other individual is a real life human being and deserves respect. Think about the times when you felt that you were not shown proper respect from others. How did it make you feel? Would you be more inclined to resolve an issue with someone who showed you respect or someone who treated you with disdain?

Naturally you would be more inclined to want to resolve an issue with someone who treated you with respect. Anyone would say this. But how do we resolve a conflict, make sure that our needs are met and still show respect to another individual?

Whether you are in a business environment or personal situation, showing respect towards other people is crucial if you are to have good communication skills, be able to resolve conflict and be emotionally competent.

One of the heaviest burdens that you can carry is a grudge. Carrying a grudge is destructive to your health as it causes undue stress. Most people who end up carrying a grudge will find that the anger that they have built up over the years takes a toll on not only their mental health, but their physical health as well. One of the most emotionally competent things that you can do is to learn to forgive. If you cannot learn to forgive, there is no moving forward in your life. You will continue to live in the past and relive slights that took place years ago. The past is gone. There is nothing that you can do to get it back again. If you hold on to the anger that you felt in the past, it is unhealthy for you. Forgive yourself and others and move on with your life. When you do this, you will achieve emotional competence.

There are six simple tools to building better anger and conflict management: emotional competence, communication skills, conflict styles, negotiation, managing stress and resiliency. We believe that each tool is vital in learning to managing anger and conflict. In this workbook each of these tools will be covered in detail. You may not realize that even if you are meek all of the time and go along with everything that others want to do, you have anger issues. These
issues may not manifest themselves the way that other anger issues present. You are angry at yourself. You may do things to deliberately punish yourself, such as date the wrong people or deliberately sabotage your career. These are all hurtful things but actions that people with anger issues perform all of the time. Some people who truly want to punish themselves for not being strong enough to stand up for themselves end up in the receiving end of abusive
relationships. They feel as though they deserve it. After all, they are far from being worthy. When you learn our six tools of emotional competence, communication skills, negotiating
arts, managing stress and how to be resilient, you can finally learn to mature into an individual who can deal with conflict in a mature and open manner. No longer will you be hiding out, allowing the Caller ID to take the calls that you cannot deal with. No longer will you be taking out your anger on innocent parties. No longer will you be dealing with conflict in a manner that is unbecoming of the person that you want to be.

Every other Sunday Conflict Coaching & Consulting, PLLC facilitates anger and conflict management classes from our Charlotte office. With the use of online video conferencing we have been providing theses weekend classes to individuals nationwide. Call 704-804-0841 or visit www.masteringanger.comfor details. Residents of Charlotte and surrounding cities are always welcomed to join us in person.

There are many ways to respond to conflict situations. Some styles require great courage while other styles require great consideration for the other party. Some styles are cooperative, others competitive, and still others are quite passive. Here are five options you might consider:

Withdraw:No Way:Avoid the conflict by pretending that it doesn’t exist, minimize the differences between you, or refrain from engaging in what seems to be an inevitable argument. Examples of withdrawing include stonewalling, pretending that there is nothing wrong, and shutting down. Withdrawing requires no courage and no consideration for your partner.

Give In:Your Way: Accommodate your partner by accepting her/his point of view or suggestion. Make peace to get past this sticking point. Allow the other to have his/her way. Be gracious and roll with the punches. Giving in requires high cooperation and low courage. Over time, it’s likely that the accommodator becomes resentful of the other party.

Stand Your Ground:My Way: Compete with the other party and ensure that you win the argument. Argue your point and do not concede any points. Fight to the finish if you must. Competitve approaches to conflict yield quick short term gains but the long term effects are great. Standing your ground requires courage but little consideration. You may win the battle, but you’re likely to lose the relationship.

Compromise:Half Way:Find a middle ground in which you both give up some ground to allow both parties to be partially satisfied. Negotiate and give in on small points in other to win the bigger battle. Looking for a common ground requires both courage and consideration. This seems good unless compromisers use guile and passive aggressive tactics to out-fox the other party.

Collaborate:Our Way: Talk and listen to the other party. Discuss and clarify your goals and areas of agreement. Ensure that other parties understand and acknowledge each other’s positions. Consider ways to resolve the problem without any concessions. Think “outside the box.” Collaboration requires great courage as well as much consideration. Collaborators are generally interpersonally intelligent and are well respected and admired.

No one should have to live in fear of your wrath.If you find that you are losing your cool all too often, perhaps it is time that you sought out anger management courses.You can even find court approved anger management classes online.Anger management courses show you how to facilitate conflict resolution without resorting to violence or threats.If you feel that you may have a problem with anger management,know that you are not alone.Many people today feel very stressed out when it comes to these type of problems and many are seeking ways to avoid violent behavior.Most of the time, this behavior is learned from our parents and from others.We know it is wrong and feel bad after we see that others are actually living in fear of us, including those that we love.If you feel that you are losing your cool a little too often and feel under pressure all of the time, perhaps you should seek out anger management . Click here to join our anger management class facilitated by an anger management expert.

Program Summary
Many police agencies have implemented programs designed to improve a police officer’s capability to manage social and interpersonal conflict. Participants in one field study came from police officers assigned to the New York City Housing Authority. Training procedures for this group included group discussions, real-life simulations of interpersonal conflicts, role plays, and lectures which were all designed to improve the participants’ ability to manage interpersonal conflicts by providing learning experiences that promoted active involvement by each participant. A comparison of program participants with controls found that for each criterion, program participants received the highest rank, denoting greatest improvement (or least decrement) on all ten performance measures. For instance, officers participating in the program showed a significantly higher clearance rate. Participants also showed decreased absenteeism as evidenced by a danger-tension index, which is calculated as total arrests divided by total sick days.

Program Description
During the 1960s, social scientists began to recognize the extent to which police are involved in interpersonal conflicts. Research indicated that many police injuries occur when they intervene in interpersonal conflicts between individuals who know one another. Also, as mental institutions began to discharge their patients in large numbers (a trend referred to as “deinstitutionalization”), police were called upon more than ever to deal with complex psychological problems. In addition, changes in many inner-city communities put heavy strains on police-community relations, and many people believed that lack of skill in managing interpersonal conflict on the part of the police either caused or exacerbated such strain.

All of these trends led to growing interest in teaching police how to resolve interpersonal conflict more effectively. Initially such efforts met with considerable opposition from tradition-bound police departments steeped in a military culture. However, they gradually gained acceptance, and today it would be difficult to find a large urban police department that has not used such training.

One of the first efforts to help police officers become more effective in managing interpersonal conflict was a program developed by Morton Bard at the City University of New York. In addition to helping participants become more competent in conflict management, this program included training in the competencies of influence, communication, empathy, and self-awareness. In one empirically-validated version of the program, police recruits attended 12 weekly half-day sessions for a total of 42 hours of training. Much of the training occurred in small groups that were led by graduate students in the CUNY clinical psychology program, with members of the police Family Crisis Intervention Unit sometimes serving as co-leaders. Training procedures included group discussions, real-life simulations of interpersonal conflicts, role plays, and lectures. The program was designed to maximize “active experiential learning” by each participant. Unlike “sensitivity training,” which was another popular training method used with police during the late sixties and early seventies, this program focused on actual conflict situations that police are likely to experience in their daily work, with the goal of teaching them the social and emotional competencies that would help them to resolve such conflict effectively.

At the conclusion of the training, the participants were assigned to two large housing projects, and the experienced officers working in those projects were assigned elsewhere. This helped insure that there would be an occupational culture that supported the training once the participants began to apply it on the job. In addition, the participants returned to the university’s Psychological Center once weekly for 14 weeks for on-going “consultation.” During these follow-up sessions, each officer participated in one hour of individual consultation about conflicts he or she had managed during the previous week. Then the officer participated in a two-hour discussion group. The goal of these follow-up consultation sessions was to help the officers gain a greater understanding of the conflict interventions in which they were involved on the job, their effectiveness in handling them, and alternatives for handling similar situations. The consultations included personal issues as well as police cases.

In order to evaluate the efficacy of this program, recruits were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group went through the program. The other group received the same amount of training (42 hours), but the aim was to provide a “well-rounded view of human motivation and behavior,” rather than training in specific social and emotional competencies. This alternative training program relied heavily on the traditional lecture format. Topics covered included psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In addition to this “cognitive training” group, the trainees also were compared to a control group of officers who worked in two other housing projects with similar environments and levels of police activity.

The three groups of officers were compared on ten performance criteria deemed important by police officials, such as clearance rates (the number of incidents reported, divided by the number of arrests for such incidents), total number of arrests, number of misdemeanors, total crime, and a “danger-tension index” (calculated as total arrests divided by total sick days and multiplied by 100). These data were collected and analyzed for each of the housing projects for the year following the training as well as for the two previous years.

The results indicated that the housing projects patrolled by the officers who went through the conflict management training showed more improvement on every criterion variable. On the other hand, there was no significant difference between the cognitive training and control groups.